Magic Cottage, Das Haus auf dem Land

by James Herbert

  Partially satisfied with my theory, I started unpacking what was left inside the cardboard boxes and was pleased when I came across the transistor radio. I switched it on and jumped when the static roared out at me. Quickly turning down the volume, I tried tuning in to a clear station and when I hit music I extended, then swiveled the aerial. The reception was still crackly. Thinking the batteries might be running down, I reached back inside the box and found the electric cord which I attached to the radio and plugged into a wall socket. The heavy static persisted.

  Muttering to myself, I switched off the set, turning as footsteps sounded on the stairs.

  "Problems?" asked Midge as she entered the room.

  "We must be in a bad reception area," I told her, "although I'm surprised it's this bad. We may need an outside aerial, maybe on the roof."

  She didn't seem concerned. "All right, I'm just off," she said. "Anything you need from the village?"

  "Uh, I'll probably remember when you get back. Watch yourself with the locals, 'specially those with bug-eyes and high foreheads."

  She gave me a reproving glare, then blew a kiss and was gone. I sauntered to the door and watched her hurry down the path, stooping to sniff at flowers here and there as she went. She waved back at me from the gate, then climbed into the car and started the engine. Pulling hard left to swing the Passat off the grass shoulder, Midge gave me a final wave good-bye. The car disappeared around the bend and I was alone in the cottage.

  I loitered in the doorway for a short while, enjoying the bright freshness of the day, a little light-headed from the champagne and orange juice.

  So far, so good, I told myself.

  The rest of the morning was spent unpacking, moving furniture, reassembling units, fitting plugs, looking for items that had gone astray—the usual run of things when you move house and begin to wonder if your life will ever be organized again. Fortunately, having lived in an apartment for so long, albeit a large one, we didn't have that much furniture to bring with us; even so, what we had was easily adequate for Gramarye.

  Eventually I found myself upstairs in one of the attic rooms which, I have to admit, was the place I'd been itching to get to all morning. That's where my musical equipment had been put, you see, and was the intended location for my own simple recording studio. I squatted on one of my amps and considered the problems.

  Noise was one. I don't mean noise going out—who the hell could it bother?—but the sounds coming in might prove a nuisance. I didn't want every tape I made during the day to have a bird chorus. Fiberglass panels alternated with equal amounts of battening for bounce-back should overcome that particular problem, and two layers of plasterboard would also be needed for the ceiling. The room's two small windows would either have to be double-glazed or blocked in.

  I mentally positioned a mixing desk, mastering machine and patch bay, forgetting for the moment the high cost of such equipment, content to enjoy the dream. Racks would be awkward because of the sloping roof, but the nineteen-inch assembling units could be spread outward instead of up if necessary.

  What pleased me was that the atmosphere in the attic room felt so good. Certainly there was a mustiness about the place, but that could soon be cleared by leaving the windows open for a few days and installing heating for the colder times. I wondered what the acoustics were like and immediately reached for the pride of my guitars, a Martin 28.

  When I took the instrument from its case I was surprised to find it needed barely any retuning after the move down. I chorded an E and the sound was rich and beautifully full, mellow but with that touch of hardness which could be softened or exaggerated depending on how the strings were struck. I did a few progressions, a few intricate runs, a few licks; I tried subtle augmentives and melancholy diminisheds and minor sevenths, loving the sounds, touching bass notes, taking lightning fingers up to the highest frets, filling the room and my ears and my mind with music, relishing one of those rare and exhilarating occasions when I felt total master of the ax.

  Only the noises from the loft brought my playing to an abrupt halt and my head back to the attic.

  I stared upward and I'm sure my mouth was agape.

  No sounds now. Had I imagined them? I scanned the ceiling, my search coming to rest on the small square hatch that led into the loft. Rising slowly and wishing I hadn't watched so many horror movies in my misspent youth, I stepped forward so that I was directly below the hatch. My head tilted back and I examined the trapdoor that was only a couple of feet or so above.

  My heart boogied when the sounds came again. I shuffled backward, almost knocking over the Martin balanced against an amplifier. I grabbed the neck to save the guitar from toppling and its strings vibrated metallically. My grip tightened across them to kill the noise.

  I had no such control over the other noises, though. They came again, a kind of scratching scurrying. Maybe not quite that, but it was difficult to define.

  Ahh come on! I said to myself, going into one of my self-conversation modes, away of goading myself on when I was uneasy about a situation. You're acting like a maiden aunt! The first time you're on your own in your new home and a couple of unexpected noises make you piss-scared. So there are mice up there. What can they do? Nibble you to death? It's an old house and bound to have lots of little creatures skulking around. Hell, this is the countryside and full of non-rent-paying lodgers! Birds, mice, spiders— But the cottage was empty before.

  No, you just didn't find anything on that particular day. Now get up there and take a look.

  Dragging over the room's one and only chair, I placed it beneath the hatch. The noises had died off, but that was no encouragement.

  I didn't know why I felt so nervous—something to do with "fear of the unknown," I imagined—but my knees were less than firm when I climbed up onto that chair.

  Now my face was only a few inches away from the trapdoor and I listened intently. Nothing there. Huh! No manacled, gray-haired, claw-fingernailed, dressed-in-tatters loony whom old Ma Chaldean had kept locked away for the past half-century because he, she—IT!—was the unfortunate product of family inbreeding. Oh no. No clinking of chains up there, no demented howls, just. . .

  . . . Oh Christ, just that scurrying scratching sound. There it goes again, on the other side of the wood.

  I stretched up a hand that wasn't very steady. The fingers flattened against the surface. I pushed.

  The trapdoor resisted for about half a second, then lifted. Only an inch, that's all I opened it. Blackness inside hung on to its secret. I slowly began to straighten my arm and the gap widened like a dark and toothless mouth . . .

  "Mike!"

  I nearly toppled from the chair as the trapdoor banged shut (I thought I heard more scurrying noises up there). I hesitated, hand poised to try again, but Midge's voice called from the stairs once more.

  "Mike, I'm back! Where are you? Come on, I've got something hot—well, it was hot—for your lunch! I raced back from the village so it wouldn't get too cold! Mike, can you hear me?"

  "Yup!" I called down.

  I glanced back at the closed hatch and shrugged. I was in no hurry to find out what was up there. Probably only mice in the rafters. Plenty of time to look later. Besides, I'd had hardly any breakfast and I was famished.

  That was my excuse, anyway.

  I jumped off the chair and went down to lunch.

  THE GRAY HOUSE

  THE "HOT" PASTIES Midge had bought in the village may have been lukewarm by the time we got to eat them, but they were delicious and filling. I wolfed down two to her one, and reached into the bag of apples she'd also brought home.

  "I'll cook a proper meal tonight," she said.

  "This is great," I told her between bites. "How was Cantrip?"

  "Okay. The people in the shops were very friendly once they discovered where I lived."

  "You told them?"

  "They asked me in the greengrocer's and the baker's if I were just passing through. I thought they were a bi
t reserved until I let them know I was going to be a regular customer. Even then they looked suspicious until I told them we'd moved into Gramarye. They really opened up after that."

  "They say anything about old Ma Chaldean?"

  "Mike, don't call her that."

  I looked toward the ceiling. "No offense, Flora. Just my way."

  "They didn't talk much about her, but I gathered she was something of a local legend; someone who kept very much to herself, though."

  "That's not surprising living all the way out here."

  "It's not so far from town."

  "It might have been for an old lady. Y'know, we never did find out what she died of."

  "Old age, I'd imagine," Midge replied, and there was an element of regret in her voice. "I hope she didn't suffer alone out here."

  "I doubt it. She'd have called a neighbor or friends on the phone, I'm sure. The social services hereabouts probably kept a close eye on her as well. All the same, life must have been sad for her, living on her own, with no relatives, not seeing many people."

  Midge twisted in her chair so that she could see out of the open kitchen window. "I don't think so. I don't think she was ever really lonely in Gramarye." Her eyes were not focused on the view outside, but on somewhere distant, not on this planet.

  "You're getting weird, Midge," I warned.

  She laughed, instantly back in this time and space. "Weird, am I? Who used to lie down on railway tracks and make me swear undying love? Who eats hardboiled eggs with the shell still on? Who came home on New Year's dawn wearing a policeman's helmet and no trousers? Who—"

  I held up a hand. "The egg was for a bet. Anyway, that was in my youth."

  "The helmet escapade was two years ago."

  "See how I've aged? Come on, we've got work to do." My policy is to change the subject when on shaky ground. I rose from the table, the chair scraping against the floor tiles. Midge reached out and touched my arm.

  "You've worked hard all morning, so why don't we take a break? There's no great urgency to get everything finished at once."

  "There's a lot of scrubbing, painting . . ."

  "We haven't explored yet. Let's go for a walk, get some fresh air, find out just where we're living."

  "I don't know . . ." I said as if pondering.

  "You're such a fakeout, d'you know that? You can't wait to get out of all those chores."

  I grinned. "You're right. They'll still be here tomorrow. Shall we drive somewhere?"

  "No." She disdainfully drew out the word. "I want to look at our surroundings. I want to go into the forest."

  "That place? You mean it's real? I thought it was just a set."

  "Titter, titter," she said, shaking her head.

  Outside, warm air wafted over me as if I'd opened an oven door and I could feel its goodness seeping through to my bones. A bee droned by and hovered over flowers, spoilt for choice. A fluttering above our heads caused me to turn and look up; I saw there were birds nesting in the eaves of the roof.

  "So that was it," I said aloud.

  Midge regarded me curiously. "That was what?" She followed my gaze.

  "I thought we had mice in the loft. I was just getting ready to take a look earlier when you called me. It must have been birds mooching around up there."

  "Inside?"

  "I'm not sure. They could have got through the eaves. I'll check it out later."

  "My man," she sighed, and dodged my pinching fingers.

  We climbed the embankment on the straight side of the cottage rather than take the steps around the curve, me pulling Midge up behind, grasping a tree branch that leaned over from the top of the incline for support. We crossed the stretch of grass, scrub and single trees and, hand in hand, like babes, we went into the woods.

  That wasn't quite as easy as it sounds, because first we had to find a way through the tangle of bracken and blackberry bushes which formed a dense barrier along the forest's edge. There were several openings, but not all were obvious at first glance and some only led into a second line of defense. Still, we eventually found a way in and it wasn't long before the cottage behind us was lost from view and the air had become gloomy damp. Our feet sank into what felt like a springy deep-pile carpet and Midge informed me that the topsoil was formed by dead leaves, plants and decomposing animals. The last part made me feel uncomfortable and it didn't help when she further informed me that what we walked on was filled with living organisms that broke down and rotted the abovementioned. That was how the forest thrived rather than becoming cluttered up with litter year after year—nothing was wasted, every dead thing, plant or animal, contributed to the life of something else. Interesting, I told her, and so it was.

  Enjoying herself, she pointed out trees and things, not in an attempt to broaden this city slicker's education, but to get me interested and involved in my new environment.

  Oak, ash, sycamore, maple—I began to appreciate the different shapes and characteristics (not that I was quite as dumb as I pretended). She explained that there were several layers to a forest. Subsoil, topsoil, and the field layer, which included herbaceous and woody plants, tree saplings, bracken and stuff. Then there was the shrub layer which contained the flowering shrubs such as hawthorn, dogwood, elder, etc. These were topped by the forest roof, or canopy as she called it; up there was where most of the big boys nested, predators like the tawny owl and the sparrow-hawk, along with others such as the carrion crow, magpie and that bunch.

  I mention all this not as a nature lesson, but as an indication of how keen Midge was to indoctrinate—no, wrong word: instruct is better—me in the ways of the countryside. She dearly wanted me to become part of it, as was she, knowing in her Midge-wise way that I'd need substitute interests now that I was away from the hustle of our other life-style.

  And I played along with her, not just to please, but because I genuinely wanted to embrace this different kind of world. You could say I'd become a little disillusioned with the last one, although again that wouldn't be entirely accurate; I think I was just looking for something more, maybe something better than I'd known so far. That's probably true of most of us, I suppose, but not many get the opportunity to change. Maybe if I'd known what I was going to find I wouldn't have been so eager.

  We stopped by a fallen tree, much of the insides rotted away to a brown clumpy powder, dark green moss creeping up what was left of the bark. Ferns did their best to camouflage the trunk further, but the tree's deadness hung around the quiet glade like a ghost over a grave. Bright red patches caught my eye and I moved forward for a closer inspection.

  Squatting down, I said over my shoulder to Midge, "Take a look at these, then tell me there's no such thing as pixies and elves."

  "I never said there weren't." She knelt close to me. "Oh. I should leave those alone if I were you, Mike."

  I prodded the toadstools with a finger. The cluster could have come from a child's storybook, something from one of Midge's paintings, so fairy tale did they appear with their light stalks and scarlet roofs dotted with white patches.

  "Poisonous?" I asked, fascinated.

  "They'll give you a very nasty tummy for a few days. They're fly agaric mushrooms, and most definitely not for eating."

  "They look pretty enough. You think there are any elves at home?" I tapped on a roof.

  "Elves don't come out when there are humans around. Let's leave them in peace or they may get cross."

  Hands against knees, I pushed myself up. "Right. I don't want any hex put on me." I looked at her seriously and said, "I wonder if there's—"

  "No, Mike, you'll only find those kind of 'magic' mushrooms in some parts of Wales as far as I know. I very much doubt if they grow in Hampshire."

  I could tell she wasn't pleased with my curiosity and I drew her close. "Hey, you know I wouldn't touch anything like that."

  She relaxed into me. "The thought frightens me, Mike. If anything happened to you like before . . ."

  The words were left suspen
ded, but Midge was referring to my bad old days and ways when I toked a little, snorted some—nothing heavy, no needles, just pass-around stuff that was hard to avoid, moving in my particular circle of musician friends. One night at a party someone had slipped me some bad coke. I'd turned blue, they told me later, and was out of it for three days. Midge had never left my side all the time I was just hanging on, my breathing a touch-and-go thing, and she nursed me through the aftermath, never once scolding, always caring, treating me like a sick baby. I was lucky to pull through with no brain damage and no police prosecution—I guess they thought I'd had enough punishment, and anyway, it wasn't me who was in possession. As far as drugs were concerned, that was it for me. No more, never again. They hadn't been exactly a habit before, and I'd never been on the really hard stuff, so leaving them alone wasn't difficult. But maybe now you'll understand why I was so shaken when I'd mildly freaked out in Gramarye's round room on that first day. Some mistakes in life are hard to escape from.

  I cuddled Midge and stroked her hair, the quietness of the forest itself producing its own calming effect.

  "You still trust me, Midge?"

  Her reply came unreservedly. "Of course I do. I don't want to be that scared for anyone ever again, that's all."

  She looked so small and forlorn I couldn't help but smile. "I'd cut off a leg rather than cause you worry," I said.

  She sniffed, but the traces of a smile appeared at the corners of her mouth. "Where would I keep a spare leg?"

  "You'd find leg room somewhere."

  She groaned so loud a bird fluttered from a nearby bush. "That's awful." She picked up broken leaves and threw them at me. "That's really awful!"